Volume 12(5): 619-642 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright © 2005 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ in Disciplinary Processes articles

John Roberts University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract. The focus of this article is on processes of social control and the role that images and processes of identification play in effecting such control. The article begins by schematically tracing the history of the new paradigm of control firstly within the managerial literature as a move ‘from control to commitment’, then through critical accounts of ‘employee subjection’, through to more recent discussions of the nature of resistance. This history and its various puzzling inversions are then reviewed through Lacan’s account of the ‘imaginary’, and Butler’s associated re-reading of oedipal identifications. These offer an account both of the constitution of a humanist, interiorized sense of self—of the self as a discrete, autonomous, independent entity—as well as of the illusions or misunderstandings of this humanist conception of the self. It is suggested that the power of the imaginary lies in the power of recognition and the way in which this acts as a lure or trap in which we seek and find ourselves. It is this desire for existence confirming recognition that founds our interest in the control of others and leaves us vulnerable to control by others. Understanding the misrecognition involved in such processes of identification allows clearer sight of the conditions for effective resistance. Key words. control; identification; identity; Lacan; resistance; self-discipline

Introduction Foucault’s account of disciplinary power has effected a sea change in the conceptualization of control and resistance at work in recent years. The DOI: 10.1177/1350508405055938

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Organization 12(5) Articles innovation of the application of Foucauldian ideas to our understanding of control arguably lies in their rejection of an essentialist view of human nature. In so far as such essentialism had informed earlier accounts of control and resistance it offered a relatively easy way to view such processes. Control was located in management’s hands and was imposed from the outside upon labour in the form of coercion, technical control, deskilling, etc. (Braverman, 1974). Such control could then be resisted even if such resistance was found to include elements of collusion and cooperation with management (Burawoy, 1979). The awkward inversion that Foucault offers involves finding power and its effects in the very site of possible resistance such that worker (and manager) subjectivity—the very ways we think of the self and its world—is itself seen as ‘a product of disciplinary mechanisms, techniques of surveillance and power/ knowledge strategies’ (Knights and Willmott, 1989). In his own account of power as ‘a mode of action upon actions’ (1982:222), Foucault places emphasis upon the ways in which knowledge comes to create a ‘field of visibility’, and it is the visibility of the subject that he insists ‘assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them.’ He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1979:202–3)

Foucault offers Bentham’s prison design for the ‘panopticon’ as the archetype for such disciplinary power. Here, blinds on a central tower have the effect of rendering the guard invisible whilst simultaneously creating a sense for prisoners of being constantly watched. A whole host of contemporary technologies of power/knowledge produce similar effects (Rose, 1990; Townley, 1993). For Foucault, what such accumulations of knowledge allow are processes through which people and groups can be made visible and thereby compared, differentiated, hierarchized, homogenized and excluded. Together, he suggests, such processes serve to ‘normalize’ and ‘individualize’. The question that I want to pursue in what follows is to ask why I/we are so vulnerable to such processes. Within the literature, the very moment of control in which subjectivity becomes ‘inextricably entwined’ with power/knowledge has been explored in a variety of ways—as selfdiscipline, as internalization, as identification with a normative ideal or ethic, as an effect of discourse, or as an existential need for the closure of identity. In my own work (Roberts, 1991, 2001a,b), I have drawn upon Foucault to explore the operation of systems of accountability in and around organizations, and the use of accounting information within these. If accounting information creates a ‘field of visibility’, then disciplinary power ‘individualizes’ by creating a narcissistic preoccupation with how the self and its activities will be seen and judged in its terms;

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts whether defensively or assertively, to be individualized involves becoming preoccupied with myself. My hope here is to be able to open these processes up to slightly closer scrutiny through drawing upon elements of Lacan’s account of the ‘imaginary’ in the formation of the subject and the elaborated view of the image and gaze, and associated identifications that this involves. The ‘imaginary’ is, for Lacan, one of three registers of experience. The ‘symbolic’ is the domain of speech and the constitution of the subject through language. Here, the subject is constituted through the places offered and taken up within discourse by the speaking subject. The ‘real’ for Lacan is not everyday social reality but rather that which will remain forever outside or cut off from symbolization. He talks of it as both a ‘plenitude’ and ‘a lack of lack’; a fullness (the real) that always exceeds and cannot be captured or reduced to a said. The ‘imaginary’ which is my focus here refers not, as in common sense, to what is imagined as in ‘ I must be imagining this’, but to the ways that the subject is constituted through images and the identifications, real and imagined, that they offer. The ‘imaginary’ is by definition a difficult dimension to write clearly about. It involves identification as a primitive form of relationship that Freud compared to eating in that it involves an incorporation within the self of an aspect of an object. It is also a magical world of hide and seek, in which I seem to find and lose myself in images. As an example of what is grasped and avoided in such identifications, Lacan uses a picture by Holbein where in front of two adorned figures of ‘The Ambassadors’ lies a ‘strange, suspended object’. Only as one turns away from the picture and looks back from an oblique angle does this strange object emerge as the image of a skull. The picture thereby contrasts a positive, substantial representation of the self with an oblique representation of its annihilation; identification with the seemingly substantial image of self, Lacan suggests, rescues me from an awareness of this lack. Lacan’s account of the ‘imaginary’ problematizes versions of disciplinary power that rely entirely upon discourse to explain the ways in which power is constitutive of subjectivity (Grant et al., 1998; Hardy et al., 2000; Alvesson and Karreman, 2000). It also offers a detailed account of quite what is involved for the subject in processes of identification (Gabriel, 1999; Pratt, 2000; Karreman and Alvesson, 2001). It can be seen to supplement an account of the fluidity of the symbolic, and hence the relational and contingent nature of identity (du Gay, 1996), with an account of the formation and possibly lifelong pursuit of the deathly desire to fix and stabilize the self within its flows. At the same time, it also suggests that the ‘need’ for security and belonging that Knights and Willmott (1989) use to ground their analysis of power and subjectivity can itself be analysed much more extensively in terms of what Lacan sees as a misunderstanding that is involved in the very formation of the ego (Newton, 1998).

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Organization 12(5) Articles The article begins with a relatively brief and inevitably partial account of the way that processes of control have been explored in terms of selfdiscipline and resistance in recent years. This paves the way for the central section of the article which explores the relevance of Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, and Butler’s associated reading of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia for our understanding of processes of control and how they are effected and effective.

Control and its Mirrors In 1985, Richard Walton published a paper titled ‘From control to commitment in the workplace’. It announces a ‘significant change’ that is underway throughout American industry in approaches to organization and the management of work. Comparing two plants, Walton suggests that the differences can be traced to two ‘radically different strategies’ for managing the work force; a traditional strategy based on ‘imposing control’ and a new strategy based on ‘eliciting commitment’. Walton argues that at the heart of the traditional model is the ‘wish to establish order, exercise control and achieve efficiency in the application of the workforce’ (1985:78). However, this wish is now threatened both by changing worker expectations and the inability of this strategy to meet the ‘standards of excellence’ set by world-class competitors. Market success, he suggests, requires a superior level of performance that needs ‘the deep commitment, not merely the obedience—if you could obtain it—of workers’, and it is in the context of this need that the new strategies of eliciting commitment have begun to emerge. Walton then goes on to list many of the different elements that together constitute the new managerial strategy and which have since become the taken for granted truths of management practice and education; de-layering, cultures of excellence, flexibility, the devolution of responsibility for quality to the shopfloor, a new emphasis on teams and shared competitive purpose, a focus on the customer, etc. As a mirror of managerial thinking about control, Walton’s article can be read as a revolution. Crucially, the traditional project of imposed control is acknowledged to have been self-defeating; the pursuit of worker obedience is now understood to have been part of what created ‘adversarial’ and collectivized employment relations. His message can be seen as emblematic of new managerial discourses that seemingly recognize individuals’ capacities for self-direction and control. The managerial role is then rethought in terms of strategies for eliciting commitment in which culture, empowerment and recognition, leadership and teams each play a key role (Peters and Waterman, 1984: Conger 2000: Luthans and Stajkovic 2000). As Willmott (1993) has observed, there is a certain moralism in these new discourses; they promise to square all circles in their claims to both recognize the individual’s capacities for self determination and then put this responsibly to work in the service of corporate or even national values. Taken at face value autonomy, responsibility,

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts values, empowerment, offer not only employees but also managers an altogether beguiling self-image as ‘new economic citizens’ (Miller and O’Leary, 1994). Arguably, part of the purpose of critical management studies is to be found in seeking to disturb the complacency and apparent moral coherence of this self-image. As Rose (1999) observes, ideally, this involves a sort of ‘cutting’ which denaturalizes the present, makes visible the tactics, strategies and programmes through which it has been assembled, and points to other ways of understanding that ‘do not valorize the psychologized, interiorized, autonomous individual of choice, selfpromotion and familial obligation’ (1999:59). Under the gaze of critical management researchers, Walton’s revolution has typically been represented, not as a celebration of worker empowerment, but rather in terms of the apparent power of normative strategies of control to perfect employee subjection. Here, I want to draw very selectively on these studies to explore the diverse ways they have sought to explore the very means through which the new forms of control are effected and effective, and the possibilities for resistance that they contain. In their study of JIT/TQM at Kay’s, following Foucault, Sewell and Wilkinson (1992) emphasize the potential for electronic surveillance to effect disciplinary power. Product families and the elimination of stocks they suggest, greatly increase the visibility of work and leave little room for the exercise of worker discretion when compared with earlier forms of technical control. Process control and product testing tie quality back to individual operators and thereby allow the delegation of ‘responsibility’ to the employee. The public display of quality and productivity information advertises both desired standards and the deviation of individuals from this. Individual self-discipline is then reinforced through an emphasis on the responsibility of teams for the attainment of targets and progress towards ‘continuous improvement’. Sewell and Wilkinson conclude that: . . . operators at Kay work in the knowledge that their basic work activity is subject to constant scrutiny, a factor which, when combined with the certainty of immediate public humiliation which will accompany the exposure of their divergences, invokes a powerful disciplinary force. (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992: 283–4)

Sewell and Wilkinson explicitly acknowledge that some might suggest that they have over-emphasized the role of ‘mechanisms of sequestration’ at the expense of the role of language in constituting the subject. They insist, however, that, in this instance at least, ‘the constant scrutiny of the Panoptic gaze . . . penetrates to the very core of each members subjectivity and thereby assures “self-management.”’ Given my present purposes, the interesting possibility that this formulation raises is that the ‘core of subjectivity’ is not within the subject but rather to be found on the surface—a possibility I will explore later. Superficially, however, this is to contradict Foucault’s insistence that visibility works through an

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Organization 12(5) Articles inscription within the self of the power relation in which the subject plays both roles. Other studies, have sought to explore directly the manner of this internalization. Here, I want to look briefly at Catherine Casey’s (1995, 1999) account of such processes within a transnational she calls Hephaestus in which she focuses on deliberate attempts to mobilize the ‘positive and generative social practices’ associated with the metaphors of ‘team’ and ‘family’. She identifies two key strategies for effecting change; the first involved promoting a set of values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour, the second involved structural and cultural practices designed to strengthen employees’ sense of ‘responsibility, feelings of identification and attachment and displays of competence’ (1999: 161). Her fieldwork pointed to the success of these strategies. Across the organization manufacturing workers, technologists, scientists, clerical workers, and managers manifested in their language forms, in their interpersonal interactions and in their sentiments toward the company and its products the preferred cultural style of self-presentation as congenial, dedicated, and identified employees. (Casey, 1999: 161–2)

In seeking to account for this success, she explores a number of mechanisms. The first, she suggests, involves ‘psychic accommodation’ to the new ‘designer’ culture, and involves belief in the new culture. Following Schwartz (1990), she suggests that employees identify with the culture as an ‘organization ideal’ which then offers the individual the narcissistic pleasures of ‘competence and accomplishment’ in the service of corporate greatness. But she also explores the underside of this idealization which, she suggests, is manifest within individuals in psychic discomfort and anxiety. The gap between the ideal and actual performance reflects back on the individual in the form of stress, which is both ‘normalized and legitimized by the new culture as it is at once officially denied’. Some of these stresses she suggests are relieved by the team—family culture, but Casey also observes instances where the team becomes an instrument of attack; colleagues turn on an individual who has betrayed the ideal, or alternatively demand (and obtain) confessions from colleagues who have let them down. Such experiences result in ‘ambivalence’ which should be seen as both an ‘incomplete internalization, or incomplete rejection’ of the new cultural values and behaviours. In part, this ambivalence arises from the failure of the ideal: ‘Narcissistically identified employees endeavour to defend against the awareness of a harsh, punishing, uncaring corporate authority and the “killing off” of some family members’ (1999: 170). In part it arises from flatter hierarchies and the competition for recognition and reward that she suggests ‘covertly revives interpersonal suspicion, sibling-like rivalry and nepotism at the same time as it overtly, officially, promotes egalitarian team mate cooperation, familial warmth, and overriding commitment to the product’ (1999: 167). The contradictions of

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts capitalism have in this way been internalized such that ‘anger is sublimely transposed into guilt’. Together, Sewell and Wilkinson and Casey’s studies offer complementary views of the objective and subjective moments through which employee subjection is realized. The enhanced visibility created through new forms of knowledge and information technologies, together with narcissistic identification with the proffered cultural ideal of family– team shift ‘the frontier of control’ from between management and labour to within the self. Here, it is played out in the form of ambivalence as to whether the organizational ideal should be rejected for misrepresenting reality or the self should be rejected for failing to live up to the ideal. The paradox of such critical studies is that, despite their identification with the subject rather than those who would subject others, their account of the extreme efficacy of disciplinary power seems only to confirm, in more sophisticated ways, the claims that managerial writers have made of the benefit for control of strategies designed to elicit commitment. As Casey reluctantly concludes: ‘the new culture’s disciplinary apparatus effectively delivers the new designer employee’ (1999: 174). Against such despair, Thompson and Ackroyd (1995) have suggested that the apparent disappearance of resistance should be understood, not in terms of the triumph of disciplinary power, but rather as an effect of the ‘shift in radical theory to Foucauldian and post-structuralist perspectives’ (1995: 622). Against Knights and Willmott’s (1985) critique of dualism in the analysis of power and subjectivity at work, they assert the value of the ‘control–resistance’ dualism as a heuristic that prevents the two terms collapsing into one another, and allows one to see the reciprocal action and actors. In some respects, Thompson and Ackroyd’s critique can be seen to be simply misplaced for evidence of resistance was already visible in the way in which, for example, Kunda (1992) found employees calling the culture ‘California bathtub crap’, and Collinson (1992) reports workers referring to the push to build a culture of excellence as ‘Yankee propaganda’ (see also Jermier et al., 1994). But their critique also found its mark and thereby stimulated more attention to processes of resistance (Casey, 1999: Knights and McCabe, 2000: Gabriel, 1999: O’Doherty and Willmott, 2002: Ezzamel et al., 2001, 2004). Now, as Fleming and Sewell (2002) have argued, within new disciplinary regimes, one perhaps needs to look harder and in unexpected places to discover resistance. But even where resistance is seemingly discovered, there remain difficulties about its status as resistance. Such difficulties are the focus of Fleming and Spicer’s (2003) exploration of ‘working at a cynical distance’. Employee cynicism can be read by management as evidence of a failure to be corrected, or more critically as resistance through which employees seek to protect themselves ‘from commitment to the company . . . and its further encroachment into the private realm of (relative) individual choice and apparent selfdetermination’ (Casey,1995: 75). But Fleming and Spicer follow du Gay

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Organization 12(5) Articles and Salaman (1992) and Willmott (1993) in pointing to the conservative character of cynicism; ‘when we dis-identify with our prescribed social roles we often still perform them—sometimes better, ironically than if we did identify with them’ (2003: 160). Drawing directly on the work of Zizek, they argue that ‘cynical distance is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy; even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’ (Zizek,1989: 32). Fleming and Spicer suggest that this ‘ideological’ reading of cynicism opens up some intriguing questions in relation to how we conceptualize subjectivity and power. They argue that from both a managerial and critical perspective, the primary mechanism of cultural control is usually understood to be identification. It is through such an assumption that dis-identification seems to offer an escape from control. But this ‘alluring breathing space’, they suggest, is precisely what allows people to act as efficient and meticulous members of the team. Similar arguments are made in relation to the internalization of corporate cultures. They suggest that a common theme in critical studies is the idea that cultural power controls the subject by inducing them to absorb into their private and isolated interiority a set of ready-made beliefs. But such a notion of interiority, they argue, is itself haunted by the assumptions of ‘humanism’. The question is why do we think belief is seated inside us, because it becomes patently clear that, although we do not internally believe in the values of the culture, we may still externally believe? (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 169)

The prospect that they offer is of identification as an externalized process such that our subjectivity is then freed up to fantasize and think about anything we want whilst our social practices ‘believe in our place’. Building upon these ideas, they suggest the potential value of a series of ‘inversions’ for our understanding of power, subjectivity and resistance (2003: 174). They suggest that critical management studies should look for the effectiveness of power not (only) in identification but also disidentification, that subjectivity should be understood not (only) as a process of internalization but of externalization, and that the possibilities for resistance should be looked for not (only) in disbelief but also in the practice of ‘believing too much’ (Fleming and Sewell, 2002). As Fleming and Spicer suggest, ‘a degree of subversion may take place when what is constituted as inside workers by the managerial gaze is pushed back as a feature that is beyond the individual and part of the organization of work itself’ (2003: 174). In this section, I have sought to briefly sketch a variety of proffered images of control, and how it is effected. Walton identifies with managers who have recognized the negative consequences of ‘imposed’ control, and in recognizing employee’ autonomy realize the need to elicit their commitment through empowerment, teams, etc. Sewell and Wilkinson

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts and Casey, by contrast, identify with those who are subject to such elicitations which are recast as normative strategies of control through which employee subjection is effected. But then their accounts of the extreme efficacy of new mechanisms of disciplinary power is itself recast by Thompson and Ackroyd as a failure of theory; resistance has not disappeared but rather been rendered invisible by the mote in the eyes of post-structuralist and Foucauldian theorists. This accusation has in turn encouraged others to look harder and in ‘unexpected places’ for the missing resistance. And then when resistance was rediscovered in ‘cynical’ dis-identification by employees, the self-image of autonomy is again reversed with the suggestion that this only serves to make practical conformity more possible. As with all identifications the different images of control each offer us an alluring moment of recognition that is offered and perhaps grasped as the ‘truth’ of the self but then collapses into its opposite. Although the debt to Zizek is explicit in Fleming and Spicer, Zizek’s central engagement with Lacan is not and yet, as I hope to illustrate in what follows, Lacan’s concept of the ‘imaginary’ offers a way to understand some of the puzzles of the various inversions that I have sought to trace here. His account of the ‘mirror stage’ can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it is an account of the foundation of a humanist, interiorized self; of a sense of self as a discrete, autonomous, independent entity. On the other hand, it is an account of the illusions or misunderstandings of the humanist conception of the self. Together, they allow us to understand the social character of control, even whilst this is denied by the ego.

The Formation of the Ego Through Identifications Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ One of the difficulties with subjectivity is that we approach its understanding as already constituted subjects; from within an existing sense of self as autonomous and coherent, with a sense of past and future and the distinctness of self from other. Lacan’s account of the formation of the subject is, by contrast, framed against the early experience of the child as immersed in bodily sensation and as yet unable to distinguish between inside and outside, self and other, past, present and future. It is in relation to this undifferentiated, pre-linguistic experience that he seeks to understand the importance of the child’s ‘recognition’ of self in the mirror image which, for Lacan, is the founding moment of subjectivity. What demonstrates the phenomenon of recognition, which involves subjectivity, are the signs of triumphant jubilation and playful discovery that characterise, from the sixth month, the child’s encounter with his image in the mirror . . . This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix, in which the I is precipitated in its primordial form, before it is

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Organization 12(5) Articles objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject. (Lacan, 1977: 18)

What is radical in this formulation is that, in contrast to Freud’s essentialist view of the ego, Lacan insists that any sense of an essence or foundation to the self is achieved only through my identifying with the ephemeral substance of my mirror image. The mirror image, he suggests, offers the child a first moment of recognition, of seemingly ‘seeing myself seeing myself’, and the body image then becomes a fixed point around which and in relation to which experience can begin to be organized. The mirror image, Lacan suggests, is the ‘primordial form’ of the I, the ‘imaginary’ base from which can follow future identifications with others, and the accession to language within which subjectivity will then also be grounded. Lacan notes the inconsistency between the present immobility and dependence of the child and the apparent coherence and unity of the image. That the mirror image can be mastered in the play of movement founds and makes possible a future autonomy; it offers the nascent self what is perhaps its first experience of autonomous control if only in the mirror. But Lacan is acutely aware that this founding moment of the ego is also a moment of alienation; what he calls a fateful ‘meconnaissance’ or misrecognition that founds the ego in a ‘fictional direction’. In what follows, I want to try to tease out the different aspects of this meconnaissance as these found our interest in the control of self and others, and also make possible the control of self by others. Lacan compares the reaction of the child to his or her image with that of the chimpanzee. Whilst the latter, he suggests, is quickly bored by its ‘objectal vanity’—by the essentially empty nature of the image—we humans, by contrast, become fascinated by the image. Our relation with the mirror, he suggests, is an erotic one; the ego is constituted in an essentially narcissistic moment of jubilant recognition. In this respect the image, and later the gaze, acquire the power to capture; they act as a ‘lure’ or ‘trap’. Glimpsed in the mirror are the founding fantasies of control; an image of the apparent substance and permanence of the self and of an objective world that might slavishly follow its will. But the mirror image involves an inversion that it is easy to miss. One aspect of this is simply that my image is reversed but more importantly it is that the relation to the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is reversed. The identification with the image locates my existence where it is not: outside me in the depth of field of the mirror image. It thus draws the child away from its immersion in the body—what Knights and Willmott (1989) gloss as ‘subjectivity as a sensuous process’—towards finding our existence in the image or objectification. But the identification with the image also involves (mis)taking the objectification of self for the nature of the self as an object. We take the image as somehow capturing the reality of the self; the image is sharp

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts and distinct; a substantial self-evident truth of the self that then serves as a model of what it is to be a self. What is founded in this way is a sense of the self as an entity; a something amongst other things (Albert et al., 2000). It is also an interiorized self. The image is of the self as an entity with the body/skin as a container so that there appears to be an inside as the space marked out within the visible outer form. This external ‘interior’ then serves as the nascent model for privacy and property, for what is uniquely mine; the image of the self as having an inalienable core that is out of reach of the social or others control. This is the ‘individual’ of neo-classical economics; a snapshot of the self—seen from the outside—that is taken to capture the essence of what it is to be a self. What is ‘fateful’ for Lacan in this identification is that the misrecognition it involves then serves as the basis of our future attempts to create what he calls the ‘armour of an alienating identity’. When we identify with (locate our very existence in) the seemingly substantial image that the mirror offers we are then caught up in possibly lifelong attempts to make a reality of this ‘attribution of permanence, identity and substantiality to the self’ (1977: 17). Since we come to self awareness through a positive knowledge of the self as this or that, it is all too easy for us to believe the self to be this or that, and to treat such objectifications of the self as a boundary that must not be crossed and as a ‘truth’ about the self that must be defended as if it were my very existence that was at stake here. (Mis)recognition here rescues the self from what Lacan insists is the ‘lack’ that is our only essence. But, importantly, it requires that our capacities for action are repeatedly subverted to the task of making, or at least preserving, a ‘some-thing’ of my self. Now Lacan’s account of these infantile dramas in front of the mirror may seem to be too distant from the realities of adult organizational control but they allow clearer sight of precisely what is involved when Foucault describes the way in which, within a field of visibility, we make the constraints of power ‘play spontaneously’ upon the self. Whilst early identifications with the mirror image are foundational they are always ephemeral and we remain prone to seek for and find our existence in the image or gaze. For Foucault, part of the power of disciplinary space arises in the breaking of the dyad of seeing and being seen—the blinds which conceal the guard within the panoptic prison. What becomes clear through Lacan’s account of the mirror stage is that the blinds set up an imaginary relation in which I identify both with the gaze that looks at me, and the self that is thereby seen. That the reality of the self is located outside the body helps us to see the sense in which Wilkinson and Sewell were able to assert that visibility ‘penetrates to the core of subjectivity’, for the ground of subjectivity is in Lacan’s formulation exterior and completely indivisible from being ‘looked at’. What is grasped positively in the mirror of performance tables and quality data etc. is the recognition of the self as ‘continuously improving’. What is fled from or avoided through conformity is the possibility of ‘public

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Organization 12(5) Articles humiliation’—the experience (or fantasy) of being seen and seeing oneself as inadequate or incompetent. Either way what is escaped is the lack that is our only essence. Lacan also insists that humans differ from animals in their awareness of the potential to use the surface of the body as a mask. The image intimates that there is an interior to the self that is beyond the reach of the gaze and into which I can retreat. As was discussed earlier in relation to resistance, dramaturgical conformance and cynical dis-identification seem to depend upon such a sense of interiority as a space within which some vestige of choice and self-determination can be preserved. But it is also clear from Lacan that this is an imaginary space that, as Fleming and Spicer argue, makes subjection as conduct more possible. But the obedience of the mirror image also informs the desire for control over others; the image of self as the source of autonomous control is also arguably a foundational fantasy for management. The fantasy here is of an external world that moves as I will it to move populated by automaton, or people who through the black arts of administrative skill have been reduced to the status of pliant and predictable objects. Plans, strategies, information systems, others’ conformity all promise, if not deliver, a sense of mastery that is perhaps first glimpsed in the responsiveness of the mirror image. Control here, as with Walton’s traditional managers, reassures me of my substance as the source of ‘order’ in the world. At the very least, career as a project of the self holds out the future promise of such autonomy and control when the top job is finally achieved (Grey, 1994). But if the mirror offers us images of the self as separate from others and as capable of autonomous control, paradoxically, by identifying with the image of self I locate my existence in the very place where autonomy is impossible. It is here that Lacan points to the ways in which the illusion of ‘I see myself seeing myself’ conceals from us how our sense of self is irrevocably bound to the gaze that constitutes the self as ‘looked at’, and beyond that to the enigma of other’s desire. The objectified self is not alone in the mirror, and indeed in his reformulation of his views of the mirror stage in the 1960s Lacan argued that the image becomes invested only because it is accompanied by the approving recognition of the parent (see Fink, 1999: 88). Here, identification with the mirror image models parallel social processes in which the gaze of the other also serves as a mirror in which the child seeks for its existence. For Lacan, the narcissistic identification with the gaze of the other—the seeking and finding of myself in the eyes of the other—serves as an explanation of the dynamics of both love and aggression. It is here that his infamous statement that ‘desire is the desire of/for the other’ acquires its full meaning in relation to the subject. For Lacan, ‘to love is to wish to be loved’ (1979: 253). The social dynamic of control that is prefigured in the mirror stage identification, is the attempt to secure the self by seeking to make oneself into the object of the other’s desire and thereby to

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts complete oneself in the gaze of the other. Here, the power of the other is the power of recognition; a power made more forceful by the difficulty of discerning quite what it is that the other wants and therefore what one must be in order to exist. Our vulnerability to the objectifications of self by others lies precisely in the way in which, as with the mirror, I locate my very existence here. Indeed recognition by others becomes the very condition of my social existence. The lack that we seek to fill with other’s recognition is precisely the negative, the void which identity seeks to suture with a positive and stable value. But if love is understood as the desire to be loved, this desire Lacan suggests is also the source of aggression. Here, he draws upon St Augustine’s account of the envy experienced by a young child watching his brother at his mother’s breast. The child looks on ‘with a bitter look, which seems to tear him to pieces and has on himself the effect of a poison’ (1979: 116). Here, the attention and goodness given by the mother to the child’s brother, robs the child of his centrality, of her existence confirming look. The relation of the self, identified with the image of self, to others is inherently unstable. The clear differentiation of the boundary of self that the mirror image offers also makes this self vulnerable to other relationships; the mirror (but only the mirror) is an essentially competitive space. The reality of the self is misplaced, outside onto or into the self-image but then the self’s reality is felt to be fatally at risk from others. The look of the other acquires the seeming power to confirm the reality and substance of the self, but, as a corollary, attention given to another seemingly acquires the power to annihilate the reality of the self. The organizational parallels here concern the sort of work group dynamics that have long been observed (Roy, 1952) and that management have sought to colonize with the new emphasis on team and family that both Sewell and Wilkinson and Casey identify as an essential element of individualized control. Arguably, managers do not even need to publicly evoke the metaphor of the family for authority relationships at work to become imbued with the significances of early parental recognition and approval. As Luthans and Stajkovic (2000) observe ‘selective recognition’ by managers is hugely powerful in leading others’ conduct towards that which is desired by management. But, as Casey found, the promise of belonging and inclusion in the family/team in practice involved a tacit competition for recognition involving jealousy, envy, and rivalry. If the demand for recognition is a demand for proof of my love-ability then my team mates are a perpetual threat to my centrality in the boss’s eye. Importantly, it is not just words that achieve such effects but looks of apparent approval or disapproval, the sense made of attention given to others, the injury to one’s sense of self contained within the acknowledgement of another’s achievements. Lacan’s account of the mirror stage can be read as a sort of synchronous account of the ‘dialectic of control’ as it is played out in the eternal

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Organization 12(5) Articles ambiguity of seeing and being seen. What is at stake in the gaze is recognition and the desire for recognition; my very existence seems to be there and at stake there. Following Lacan, Butler writes: As imaginary, the ego as object is neither interior nor exterior to the subject, but the permanently unstable site where that spatialized distinction is perpetually negotiated. (Butler, 1993: 76)

To the degree to which I think to find my existence in the image then I am subject to a sort of permanent instability, and the attempt to resolve this ambiguity provides the permanent, and permanently failing, engine for many of the dramas of organizational control and resistance. These dramas have almost infinite permutations. I can seek to realize sufficient power such that I can control others’ responses to me; get others to be subject to my desire. But this then turns out to require my own subjection and renders me vulnerable to their resistance. I can seek to free the self altogether from its dependence on others by fixing the value of the self in other things—car, status, achievements—but then these can never be quite fixed or secured. I can be selective about whose recognition I seek and thereby find all sorts of ways to practice indifference towards others but these then turn out to be competitors or rivals. I can seek to control myself in order to make myself into what will allow others to recognize me, but what is wanted of me is then itself always enigmatic and liable to change. I can resist others in defence of my autonomy but then find myself curiously bound up with those I resist. I can through dis-identification find ways to deny that it is really ‘me’ who is conforming but still conform. All these different versions of the project of autonomous control can be seen as aiming either to free the self from, or secure the self within the ‘permanent instability’ of the gaze. But what is being attempted is impossible for self-identity—a reflexively constituted sense of self —can never be unilaterally constituted. If there is a perpetual anxiety here, it arises not from some existential need but, more simply, from the socially constructed, and therefore unstable, character of any identification.

From the ‘Imaginary’ to the ‘Symbolic’ If the mirror stage was the final moment in the development of the subject then we would all remain hopelessly lost in hunting for ourselves in the mirror of reciprocal identifications. As Grosz puts it, ‘left to itself, the mother–child relationship would entail a vicious cycle of imaginary projection, identifications, internalizations, fantasies and demands that leave no room for development and growth’ (1990: 50). What is held to rescue us from such a complete narcissistic absorption is yet a further alienation realized through the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the accession of the child to language. Lacan seeks to avoid the biologism of Freud’s account of Oedipus by emphasizing the importance of the father’s intervention as a third party into the dyadic mother–child relationship. The father in Lacan’s account is an incarnation or delegate of

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts the ‘symbolic father’; the representative of the Law to which all are subject. It is only this third party intrusion that frees the child to assume its place in the symbolic order as a speaking subject. Here, I want to follow two aspects of Butler’s constructivist re-reading of both Freud and Lacan1. In his original formulation of Oedipus, Freud argued that early ‘object cathexis’ (relationships) towards both the mother and father brings the child into a dangerous and jealous rivalry with the other, and that this is resolved only through different degrees of identification with both. He suggested that these identifications make it possible for the child to give up the relationship with the other through installing them as an ideal within the ego as an ‘ego-ideal’ or super-ego’. Freud argues that the process of loss always involves ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards what is given up and that this then comes, through identification, to be articulated within the ego as a ‘conflict between one part of the ego and the critical agency’ (1991: 226); ‘one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and as it were, takes it as its object’ (1991: 256). The difficulty with such forms of explanation is that they tend to assume the very categories that they are seeking to explain, and there is a clear danger that the categories of ‘id’, ‘ego’ and ‘ego-ideal’ merely populate the person with a whole array of ‘sub-entities’ upon whose assumed existence the narrative of development then depends. But in her constructivist re-reading of Freud, Butler argues that this turn from object (others) to ego is precisely what ‘interiorizes the ego’; melancholy ‘produces a set of spatializing tropes for psychic life, domiciles of preservation and shelter as well as arenas for struggle and persecution.’ The turn from object to ego is the movement that makes the distinction between them possible, that marks the division, the separation or loss, that forms the ego to begin with. (Butler 1997: 170)

In this way, Butler suggests, identification with the lost other reinforces the nascent division between self and world—further enforces a sense of their separateness (dualism)—and at the same time internally divides the ego. Importantly, what is being described through this turning, critically, back upon the self is the ground of what Foucault describes as one of the meanings of the word ‘subject’—’tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self knowledge’ (1982: 208). Freud suggests that the severity of ‘conscience’ is the product of the reversal of earlier aggression towards the other. In this respect the ‘turning back upon itself’ is to be understood as a turning of one’s own aggression back upon the self and it is for this reason that we are inclined to respond so guiltily to the ‘interpellation’ of others. Here, we find the precursor for Casey’s suggestion that in the disciplined workplace ‘anger is sublimely transposed into guilt’. The aggression that in former times might have been externalized in the form of overt resistance, comes through identification with the organization

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Organization 12(5) Articles ideal, to be turned back upon the self and is then played out within the self in the ambivalent relation between the ego and organization ideal. The second aspect of Butlers re-reading of Freud and Lacan’s account of Oedipus that I want to follow in relation to social control is the underside of this ideal—what she terms its ‘defining negativity’. Certain forms of disavowal do reappear as external and externalized figures of abjection who receive the repudiation of the subject time and time again. . .This is not a buried identification that is left behind in a forgotten past, but an identification that must be levelled and buried again and again, the compulsive repudiation by which the subject incessantly sustains his/her boundary. (Butler 1993: 114)

Butler is here pursuing the thought that the heterosexual ‘norm’ depends upon repressed, denied and abjected homosexuality. Any identity is constituted by the other that it is not. Butler is suggesting that feminized male homosexuality and masculinized female homosexuality both serve as the ‘restrictive spectre that constitutes the defining limits of symbolic exchange’; an absolute limit of what I might think myself to be. What I want to explore here are the repudiated images of abjection that enforce the organization ideal and have arguably structured the dialectic of control. Given the desire for and power of recognition, one might wonder quite why it has taken so long for managers to recognize the individual capacities for self-direction and control of the employee. Butler’s notion of abjection as the ‘defining negativity’ of identity may be relevant in this respect. In Taylor’s classic formulation of the rational scientific manager, it can be argued that he needed Schmidt to be a mindless body as a guarantee of the necessity and goodness of his own (unique) mental capacities for planning and control. Similarly, management’s refusal to recognize labour can be seen to have involved a variety of abjections. On the one hand, the refusal involves a denial of dependence and the manager’s need of the other. It is also a denial of the incompleteness of the manager; a denial of what management cannot do. On the other hand, it is very powerful to refuse recognition; the refusal contains the employee by robbing him/her of a sense of existence and capability. At least in the mirror of the manager’s eye it is as if I do not exist, or find myself only as an object of use. But then recognition was found in informal relations with similarly abjected colleagues, in the games of ‘making out’ that were then devised, and even in overt resistance and contestation. But as has frequently been observed such resistance typically took the form not of an attempt to supplant management but rather of a ‘demand’ made upon management for ‘recognition’; a ‘demand’ to be acknowledged as more than mere bits and pieces of labour. Such a demand assumed that management had what employees needed, if only they could be persuaded to give it to them. But, following Lacan, one can suggest that this was to give management a power that would always

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts disappoint. The inevitable result was a polarized workplace—a sharp division between the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of management and labour—that provided each side with a convenient space for the projection of all that was disavowed in the self. Collinson (1994) captures some of this dynamic when he observes workers’ attempts to distance themselves from their subjective experience of being treated as ‘commodities’, ‘unthinking machines’ and as ‘second class citizens’. Resistance here had workers fixing the bonus scheme to their benefit, and inverting the hierarchy by making shopfloor work into ‘a site of real, authentic and experiential knowledge’, whilst denigrating the ‘theoretical knowledge’, ‘pen pushing’, conformity of the managerial ‘yes men’ (1994: 33). Both control and resistance here are animated by the desire to rid the self of abject images, and, significantly, Collinson notes that when redundancies were announced there was no active resistance. The managerial revolution that Walton then announced involved a double movement. Firstly, it involved a recognition of the employee as a fellow subject—as an other who, like the manager, had the capacity for self direction. Secondly, it involved management presenting themselves as incarnations or delegates of the ‘symbolic father’ of the ‘law’ of competitive markets, and consumers who must be served. The price of recognition required employees to identify with this law and thereby install it as an ideal against which the value of the self can be judged. Following Lacan, I have argued that the success of these new individualizing practices of management control lies precisely in the power of recognition as a lure or trap in which employees seek and seem to find the self, but it also requires a new site into which all that is inadequate can be placed. Casey’s suggestion is that, in part, it is relocated within the self in a sense of failure or self-blame, or alternatively displaced onto colleagues who betray the organization ideal. More emphatically, however, it is located in those who are found not to have what it takes to remain in the ‘happy family’, or are not even let in the door. But this account of the more complete subjection of the employee should not be taken as cause for despair for it also contains more positive potentials. From both managerial and critical perspectives, the highly individualized employee is potentially a problem. Either they owe no loyalty to anything other than the self, or their self-absorption binds them to career and self-advancement and thus precludes collective action/ resistance. What can also be suggested, however, is that the new strategies of recognition are potentially ‘dangerous’ in so far as they constitute the employee as a speaking subject much more fully and competently than earlier indifference or counter-dependence. In this way, individual capacities for resistance are potentially strengthened even if this takes novel forms (Fleming and Sewell, 2002). As advocates of empowerment have traditionally cautioned, there is always the danger that its meaning will be taken too literally. This then creates the potential for what Fleming and Spicer (2003) explore in terms of ‘believing too much’; the

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Organization 12(5) Articles (discursive) re-externalization of aggression towards the organization ideal itself for being less or other than it is claimed to be. Similarly, as Ezzamel et al. (2001, 2004) have recently explored, there is the potential for a new confidence and knowledge-ability to be forged in ‘responsible autonomy’ that serves as a resource for collective resistance that can now involve the skilled discursive challenging of management claims and proposals.

The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ in Disciplinary Processes In the above, I have sought to augment or supplement the discursive focus of existing accounts of processes of subjection, by exploring the neglected dimension of the ‘imaginary’ and its ‘self’-defining power within disciplinary processes. The key point of the preceding analysis is the suggestion that we are vulnerable to processes of subjection because they offer confirmation of our existence. Here, I have followed the emphasis that Foucault himself places upon visibility through to Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage. Rather than assume an existential need for security and belonging, or alternatively to treat the ego as a pre-given structure within the psyche, Lacan’s analysis suggests that the ego is itself only constituted in a series of founding identifications that prefigure and make possible a future subjectivity. The force of Lacan’s analysis is to point to the power of the image as a lure or trap. The meconnaissance that Lacan observes is essential as the very foundation of the ego but the fateful error within this is to (mis)take the objectification of the self for what the self is—an object. It is this that makes the subject’s knowledge of itself paranoid, for it is only the complete identification with the image—the (mis)location of one’s very existence here—that makes us so vulnerable to other’s objectifications, for it is then as if others’ recognition has the power of life and death over us. Such recognition will always turn out to be misrecognition, but this is better than not to exist at all. Butler’s reading of Freud adds some further dimensions to this analysis by pointing to the way in which the identification with the lost object not only inaugurates a division between psyche and the external world, but also internally divides the ego. The ambivalent relationship to the object is internalized as a split between the ego and an organization ideal with which we then berate ourselves. To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a subject is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt. (Butler, 1997: 118)

We look for recognition not just as confirmation of our existence but also as evidence of the worthiness of our existence. The ideal provides the ground with which conscience can be turned aggressively back upon the self. The entry of the subject into language involves a further

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts alienation that rescues us from a complete self absorption. But we enter discourse, as it were, ready made to seek for our existence in the objectifications of self that it offers, and already guilty in relation to the ideals for selfhood that it advertises. We also retain a fascination and fear of the images and objectifications in which we seem to find the self reflected. Part of the merit of Foucault’s analysis is that it points to the entirely social processes whereby a sense of self as individual, coherent and independent is realized. But the very constitution of such an individualized sense of self leads us to deny or forget the irretrievably social constitution of the self. The narcissistic origins of reflexivity imply that almost all experience can by treated as a mirror of the self and yet the objectifications in which I locate my existence can never be autonomously controlled. To be individualized is to become and remain preoccupied with myself. A drama is inaugurated in which the struggle is seemingly internal in my attempts to master the self, even if the price of mastery is the completion of subjection. Here the ‘narrative’ of personal identity—the project of what the self will become—embodies and structures this self-absorption. As Giddens puts it, ‘A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor—important though it is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going’ (1991: 54). But such self-absorption is repeatedly problematized by the objectifications of self by others. In this respect, the processes of comparison, hierarchization, differentiation, homogenization and exclusion that Foucault observes as the objective mechanisms of discipline have as their necessary correlate similar process ‘within’ the ego as I seek to fix identity in the essentially competitive space of the mirror of my own and other’s objectifications. The persecutory ideal of the self can often only be appeased through the projection of all that is inadequate onto others, or a defensive dis-identification that has as its aim not to challenge power but rather to deny the self’s active collusion with power. At the very least, the ego is anxiously and endlessly involved in looking for the ways in which ‘I’ am similar or different, better or worse, more or less, loved or hated, included or rejected by others. All this amounts to the development of a strong interest in control not just of the self but of others in order to assure that we win their recognition through our own or their subordination, or more typically both. There is then a sense in which subjection involves both a denial of sociality and then perhaps a recasting of the social as a domain solely of a struggle for control in the interests of the ego. In this respect, Lacan allows us to see how the social comes to be conceived almost completely in terms of control, as the means whereby the self-image can be fixed and stabilized. That this project is ‘congenitally failing’ typically leads us only to redouble our efforts to control others, and/or further berate ourselves.

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Organization 12(5) Articles But the value of Lacan’s analysis goes beyond understanding why we are so vulnerable to the mechanisms of disciplinary power. It also allows a clearer sight of the nature of resistance. One implication of the above analysis of the formation of the ego through identification is that we can assume our own agency not against but only through subjection. But, as many writers have observed, this raises severe constraints for any possibilities for resistance. As Poulantzas puts it ‘if power is already there, if every power relation is immanent in itself, why should there ever be resistance? From where would resistance come, and how would it ever be possible?’ (1979: 148–9). Part of the power of the imaginary lies in the way that our capacities for reflection (and action) are endlessly subverted either by the desire for other’s recognition or by our own attachment to particular ways of thinking the possibilities of the self. Similarly, our capacities to interrogate the terms of discourse through which we are held to account are constrained by the mesmerizing concern to demonstrate our competence to others, win their approval or prove ourselves to be the subject who already knows. Lacan’s analysis allows us to observe this unwitting collusion with power. Identification collapses the space for resistance for it is through such identification that we inscribe the power relation within the self. But resistance is also integral to the operation of disciplinary power, in part through the felt necessity to defend our imagined autonomy against the intrusion of others. All too often, however, such resistance takes the form of what Zizek (2000: 252) calls a ‘deadly mutual embrace’ that binds me ever more tightly to that which I resist. But even though we will perhaps endlessly fall into the mirror it is I think very helpful, following Lacan, to know that I am not the entity that I mistake myself for. One of my concerns even about a critically informed treatment of identity is that we somehow come to take the very project of identity for granted. The almost instantaneous character of identification, the finding of the self in the other’s response, the restless and endless processes of comparison, ranking, differentiating that this stimulates, along with the reflexive repair work on the self that follows, suggests that researching such processes requires a much more micro focus than merely observing the subject positions offered up by a particular discourse. A switch of attention from identity to its constitutive identifications, and associated projections and repudiations, is precisely what allows the contingency and instability of identity to become evident. No doubt such processes are highly variable both personally and contextually. But to document such micro processes of self-preoccupation also offers sight of what such processes occlude or foreclose. Lacan’s insistence on the meconnaissance of identification points to the emptiness of the mirror, and this suggests the potential for research to explore the different possibilities for action that the knowledge of our lack of entity status might imply.

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The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ John Roberts As O’Doherty and Willmott (2002) argue, the analysis of identity at work is not necessarily a denial of the material conditions of exploitation, nor of some collective ideal of emancipation, but rather a detour that allows one both to account for the subject’s inadvertent collusion in its own exploitation, and to explore the subjective conditions under which these might be effectively resisted. The clear implication of the Lacanian analysis of identification is that the struggle is in part a personal one; a struggle against the deathly desire to fix and stabilize identity. In this respect, resistance requires a willingness to act not in defence of the self but rather involves, as Zizek puts it, a ‘striking against oneself’. This act far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned on oneself, rather changes the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. (Zizek, 2000: 122)

In a sense, we are held in place, and hold ourselves in place, through our attachment to identifications. It is these that constitute the ‘precious object’ whose recognition by others we crave, and in defence of which we both exercise/collude with/resist power. Lacan’s insistence that they involve a certain meconnaissance points to the potential for a loosening of our attachments to such synthetic objects and to the space for action that this opens up. Deetz (1992) makes a similar point when he suggests that ‘communication is not for self-expression but for self-destruction. The point of communication as a social act is to overcome one’s fixed subjectivity, one’s conceptions, one’s strategies’ (1992: 343). There is of course much that is of value to be found in the mirror of our own and other’s objectifications of the self; they are a vital source of learning. But the ‘problem’ of identity and the power of the imaginary lies in the paranoid grasping at these representations of the self as my ‘truth’ rather than as a useful but knowingly partial gestalt of the self as this or that, that can only ever be a snapshot of my ‘coming to be’. In so far as I am able to live with this ‘unbearable lightness’ of being, then one vital consequence is that my agency is no longer (completely) absorbed in the task of preserving, protecting, defending or enhancing my self-image. As with the chimpanzee the mirror, good or bad, loses its mesmerizing power. Rather than forget entirely about identity here, an alternative and arguably more appropriate object for identification comes into sight. I can identify not with who I am as the world reflects my ‘substance’ back to me but rather with what I do and its consequences. Such consequences are to be understood not reflexively in terms of the consequences of action for how I will be seen, but rather in terms of the consequences of my actions for others whom I am now willing and able to acknowledge my dependence upon and my unavoidable practical interdependence with. Such conduct is not defensively bound to the other in the way that resistance is often bound to control, but instead involves a radical taking rather than displacing of responsibility.

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Notes I would like to thank the editors, the two anonymous reviewers, Hugh Willmott and Peter Fleming for their helpful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 For a very lucid account of the ambivalent relationship between feminist writers and Lacan, see Grosz (1990).

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John Roberts is is a senior lecturer at the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge. He took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the Manchester School of Management. Prior to joining the Judge Institute in 1990 he held senior research fellowships at the Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Manchester, the Centre for Business Strategy at the London Business School, and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. His current work is focused on corporate governance and processes of accountability, with qualitative empirical research on the dynamics of board roles and relationships, and corporate/fund manager relationships. Address: The Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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